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Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

> The teardown photos are hilarious because the motherboard only takes up about 1/6 the internal space. The rest is empty. https://hackaday.com/2017/04/28/hands-on-with-the-pinebook/

As mentioned in that review, the software part seems to be a problem area for Pine. That could also be why it's cheap (because it's mainly the hardware alone that one is paying for). I got the original Pine64 board through the crowdfunding campaign, and I found the distro images provided to be lacking and also not kept updated. I wanted to use it like a headless server/NAS kind of setup with VNC access to run other programs as necessary, but found that a bit too hard to get done. So it's just been gathering dust since then.

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The Ubuntu image has been actively maintained for a while now. Though now the maintainer is putting more effort towards Android 7.1. Which is the crux of the issue... These distros are usually maintained by just one community developer.

serious question: why do people insist on using Ubuntu for low-end hardware like this and the PI??? Ubuntu is a cluttered nightmare full of so much unecessary stuff. Why not use a minimalistic non-GUI barebones version of Debian and build your OS up from there?

I agree. I'm a fan of headless Debian, and running i3wm when needed. (I currently run headless Ubuntu, but only because Debian on the Pine is no longer maintained)

If you need multimedia and heavy web browsing, run Android. That's what it was designed for.

That's good news. Could you please point me to where these updated images are? I had been looking at the official site [1] once every few months last year, but didn't find the Ubuntu (or Debian) images updated. The dates are still from end of 2016.

[1]: http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pine_A64_Software_Release

https://github.com/ayufan-pine64/linux-build/releases/

I'd recommend the Xenial images. There are Mate/i3wm versions for the pinebook, but all the others (Pine64 & Sopine) are headless and require the installation of a GUI.

Thanks for that link. I'm looking for updated images for Pine64 (not Pinebook), and all of them on this repository seem to be minimal images (without a desktop environment). Is my understanding correct? I'm looking for one with a desktop environment.

Yeah, I'm afraid that's the case :/ So you'd have to SSH into your pine64 and install a GUI yourself.

Then to enable Mali support (which basically lets the device actually use the GPU to render the screen), you have to add an additional repository:

  - apt-add-repository ppa:ayufan/pine64-ppa -y
  - apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-armsoc-sunxi libmali-sunxi-utgard0-r6p0

then you'd run the script to enable it. Probably need root to run it.

  - exec /usr/local/sbin/pine64_enable_sunxidrm.sh

Then in your GUI's settings, you'd disable software compositing (force it to use the Mali GPU instead of the pine's CPU)

  -  System -> Preferences -> Look and Feel -> Windows and disable Enable software compositing.

If things go awry, or you have more questions, there's a community IRC that's usually pretty active with people willing to help. http://pine64.xyz/

FreeBSD makes images available for it that you burn to the SD card and pop in and you are off to the races, although just for -HEAD so you end up chasing new images every so often since the system is still heavily in flux.

Thanks for the pointer on FreeBSD for Pine. I wasn't aware about this. I've now found the images online, though it'll require some reading to figure out if it's appropriate for me.

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